Remains of the Day: Starck contrast

A noted French designer is isn’t working on a project for Apple. Tim Cook definitely may have visited the offices of a prominent video game company. And Amazon offers a ton a decent number of streaming titles. The remainders for Friday, April 13, 2012 aren’t are calling it a day.

Well, that was fast enough to make your head spin. Only a matter of hours elapsed between designer Philippe Starck’s announcement that he was working on a secret, “revolutionary” project for Apple and Cupertino’s denial of the same. (It seems he may have been designing a yacht for Steve Jobs before the late Apple co-founder’s death.) That’s good news for you, Philipe, because you do not want to go mano-a-mano with Jony Ive.

From thin to thinner: Reports have Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Bellevue, Washington headquarters of gaming firm Valve. I’ll double down and say that Cook was there because he really, really wanted to get his hands on Half-Life 3.

A lawsuit brought by parents against Apple over in-app purchases made by kids is moving on to the next step. The issue revolves around kids who were able to make in-app purchases without being required to enter a password, potentially racking up huge charges. No word on a similar lawsuit, where parents are suing because their kids have become way better than them at iPhone games.

Speaking of protecting users, it appears Apple is beefing up security: The company is apparently requiring users to establish security questions before downloading apps on an iOS device. However, these prompts reportedly only appear intermittently, leading some to worry that they were some sort of phishing attack. Come on, people: Apple already has all your valuable information—what else would they need to phish for?

Whoops. Looks like Amazon has been, well, exaggerating about the number of TV shows and movies it has in its streaming library. Specifically, the company has been counting each episode of a show in its total of “more than 17,000 movies and television shows.” In other news, Amazon now has roughly 6 hojillion books available for sale (if you count each word as separate book, naturally).